Summary
The laboratory at Langley was established in 1917, and it expanded as the government bought more land from Hampton and the surrounding areas. Construction of the West Area began in 1939, and in 1942 the buildings are painted dark green to camouflage them against possible Axis attack. The West Area houses the black computers (the white computers are in the East Area), around 20 of them when Vaughan joins, with a white computer named Margery Hannah as their supervisor. The computing operation at Langley includes around 200 women, supervised by Virginia Tucker, head computer. Engineers come to Tucker with a computing assignment, which she gives to Hannah, who passes it along to the West Area computer best suited for the job.
The American aircraft industry was the country’s 43rd largest industry in 1938; by 1943, it's the world’s number-one industry. Langley is scrambling to maintain production and innovation. Employee sections don't generally mix, except in the cafeteria, where the West Computers are required to sit together at a table with a white cardboard sign: COLORED COMPUTERS. A West Computer named Miriam Mann starts putting the sign in her purse (even though this could get her fired). Eventually, Langley stops putting up new signs. Some white employees treat the West Computers relatively well, such as Hannah, who invites them to social events even though this makes her a pariah with some white colleagues. Others are ambivalent about the black womens’ presence at Langley, with many engineers taking the pragmatic view that if someone can do math, they can do math—end of story. Virginia society at large is not as accepting, but the West Computers endure, “having internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.”
There are black pilots in World War II, notably the Tuskegee airmen, but all Americans are concerned with the improvement of aircraft—and they’re anxious to protect those improvements from possible Axis spies. A crash course in engineering physics is set up for new computers, and Vaughan attends, learning the basics of aerodynamics. Shetterly describes these basics, then explains that most airplane development was done through trial and error in the past. Now, using wind tunnels of various sizes and strengths, parts of planes and even whole planes can be tested in simulated flight, so Langley mathematicians can make educated inferences about what will happen in the air before a human has to risk their life. Many computers don’t see the broad picture of what they’re calculating—projects are removed from their context when given to a computer—but some projects are so enormous that everyone gets to take credit for its success, from the head of the NACA to the janitors. One of these is the successful bombing of Japan seven months into Vaughan’s work at the NACA.
In 1944, Vaughan moves her children to Newport News permanently, navigating a high demand for black housing and the racial/economic segregation that persists in Virginia. Howard Vaughan keeps his itinerant hotel work. By 1945, half of the people in the Hampton area work for the government—when V-J Day arrives on August 15, 1945, ending the war, many of these people lose their jobs, especially women. For black people, both job security and housing security is even riskier than during wartime.
Katherine Goble, whom Vaughan had known as Katherine Coleman, is working as a teacher in West Virginia in 1944 when her husband, Jimmy, gets severely ill. We learn her backstory: she was incredibly resourceful and curious from childhood, learning French and chatting easily with all sorts of people at the hotel that hired her father (where Howard Vaughan also worked). She studied mathematics at university, and she married Jimmy in secret because West Virginia didn’t let married women go to school. Katherine was picked by the president of her alma mater to desegregate West Virginia University, and she was one of only three black students on campus in 1940. After a year, she discovered she was expecting a child, so she left school and didn’t regret it, only reflecting occasionally on her time studying mathematics.
Dorothy and Howard Vaughan continue seeing each other only sporadically, with Dorothy giving birth to two more sons in 1946 and 1947 as Howard works with Joshua Coleman. Vaughan returns to work at the NACA quickly after both births. By 1946, she is a shift supervisor and a permanent civil service employee. She bonds with other West Area computers like Miriam Mann and Kathryn “Chubby” Pedrew, taking their families on annual picnics. Their jobs are secure because of an enormous defense industry boom, and in 1947 the United States Air Force is officially established, keeping southeastern Virginia a key part in what Eisenhower would later call “the military-industrial complex.”
After the war, the next goal is the speed of sound; pilot Chuck Yeager pierces the sound barrier for the first time in October 1947 in a NACA-developed plane, with a female computer analyzing the data. Even though the work done by women is almost always anonymous, not mentioned on reports or in meetings, computers’ work grows in importance as the NACA’s postwar work gets more complex. A woman who impresses engineers might be invited to join a group of engineers full-time, where she has the opportunity to specialize in a particular field of aeronautics.
East Computing is dissolved as white computers specialize, and Virginia Tucker, head computer, moves to an aviation company as an engineer. However, black computers don't get the chance to specialize as often—Dorothy Hoover is one who specializes, going over to the particularly progressive Stability Analysis engineers. West Computers' work load increases as East Computing dissolves. Margery Hannah, West Computing’s head, moves to a research division, so her assistant, Blanche Sponsler, takes over. From 1947 to 1949, Sponsler struggles with what will come to be known as schizophrenia, eventually giving an unintelligible morning meeting at Langley, being taken to a sanatorium, and dying in June 1949. In her absence, Dorothy Vaughan is appointed acting head of West Computing. It will take two years before the NACA makes that title official.
Analysis
Hidden Figures focuses on the parts of war directly connected to Dorothy Vaughan's computations, rather than providing a detailed history of World War II. This means that some knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader—familiarity with terms like V-J Day and the Axis powers, for example. Instead of explaining D-Day and world leaders' decisions, Hidden Figures discusses the planes (and therefore the bombs dropped by those planes, notably the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) because they relate to Vaughan's work, the practical application of her years of complex computations.
As the war ends, many women leave the workforce, either willingly or unwillingly. Vaughan remains at Langley, even moving her kids with her to Newport News, while Howard continues traveling for work. Vaughan's story here highlights the housing inequality experienced by black people during and after wartime. Shetterly includes the history of neighborhoods in the areas surrounding Hampton, and she returns to property histories throughout, highlighting the issue of affordable living spaces and access.
The war's end brings another shift to Langley: the research is no longer driven by the life-or-death reality of warfare. Research gets a lot less practical. Improvements are made to wind tunnels, allowing engineers to research the sound barrier more effectively, and it's broken within a few years (though scientists actually thought Chuck Yeager, the pilot, would explode once he hit that barrier). As the math becomes more specialized, people specialize, too. A general pool of computers doing calculations isn't the best system anymore, since knowledge of the experiments helps do those calculations. East Computers are the first to specialize, but especially brilliant West Computers get the opportunity as well (though Hidden Figures emphasizes that Dorothy Hoover's group of engineers is a particularly progressive one).
Blanche Sponsler's tragic struggle with schizophrenia, undiagnosed at the time, provides an opportunity for Dorothy Vaughan to become the first black supervisor at the NACA. This promotion probably wouldn't have happened without a severe medical emergency, as indicated by the NACA's two-year-long reluctance to make the promotion official. It's hard to call this series of events "luck," especially for Sponsler and those who knew and loved her, but in a way it's an example of the "right place, right time" serendipity discussed elsewhere in the text.
On a structural note, it's important to mention that Shetterly almost never depicts more than one or two lines of dialogue. She describes scenes rather than portraying them exactly; for example, Sponsler's incoherent morning meeting is described in detail, but only two lines of dialogue are used, each disconnected from the other. This accomplishes a few things. First, it's simply more accurate—imagining entire scenes of dialogue would take this book away from nonfiction and into the historical fiction realm. Second, it encourages readers to fill in those gaps themselves. To picture what was said at, say, Mary Jackson's dinner table with other young black Langley employees, one must literally picture it, thereby engaging further with the material.
